Coach Cozart must have retired. Thats why I said “was/is” because I wasn’t sure if they were still a power. 

This aint your daddy's Brandon wrestling team anymore. Brandon has fallen off the globe from what they were when we were in HS. But now you have top teams like South Dade, Lake Gibson, Somerset Academy, and Tampa Jesuit that pretty much dominate the sport in the state of florida. Somerset is a school that takes full advantage of the situation that I explained earlier. They also have a lot of kids that go there and wrestle in grades 6 through 8th and then transfer to South Dade for freshman year or stay at Somerset. They even had a kid the past few years that would play football for Western HS and wrestle for Somerset. It is what it is....The system is F'ed and there aint no going back. 

But that would be punishing programs who are successful. For example. Brandon High is/was a national powerhouse for wrestling for decades. So if you have a kid in the Tampa area who is coming up in elementary and middle school and is a stud wrestler, it would a huge disservice of the parents to not at least try everything they can to get their kid to Brandon. That is the pathway to success.    So why should Brandon be punished by having state championship aspirations stripped away because they laid a foundation of excellence in their craft?    Brandon doesn’t need to recruit. Anyone who wrestles knows Brandon wrestling. So if studs are showing up at their door in droves, why should they have to turn them away and crush their dream? Or have to be punished, sentenced to expensive regional AAU-type competition? 

And this helps to underscore the reality that K-12 SCHOOLS should be completely separate from big-time, for-profit sports. In truth, they already are in every way but the official way. Make big-time, for-profit sports REGIONAL rather than attached to K-12 schools.

If you go through ALLLLLLL that craziness travel and lose the typical high school experience with prom, homecoming, friends, girlfriends etc. Just to play a sport then doesn’t that kind of tell you how important that decision is to that kid and his parents? You are not going to do all of that for a hobby. This is something that they most likely are investing time, money and effort into hoping that it takes them to the next level and doing it locally minimizes that chance in their opinion